Show HN: My Claude quota ran out in 10 minutes, so I made a tool to find out why

sachinneravath 75 points 55 comments August 27, 2026
github.com · View on Hacker News

Discussion Highlights (16 comments)

DarmokTanagra

I didn't know it was still possible to develop software after your ai quota runs out.

underlines

You can't ask Claude if your quota ran out. You have to wait for the reset...

jasonjmcghee

I care more about your experience. I'd read the blog post of the story behind this.

lbrito

How on Earth does one use 1.1B tokens in a week?

nonameiguess

23 em-dashes in the span of a single README. I gotta hand it to Anthropic. They seriously managed to find a completely legal way to sell crack to crack addicts using other crack addicts as their unpaid sales force.

luciandan

Pretty cool tool! Congrats! Not sure if I'm missing something but this tells you where your tokens went, breakdown per day/tool. So the "why" is still a question left for the user to answer. Can be something like "Because I was missing a good CLAUDE.md file so it had to explore the whole repo before doing any work" or anything else. Just my take.

ryandrake

I made an "amateur hour" error with Codex. Given Anthropic's recent reliability problems I thought I'd take a little time to try Codex with their $20/mo plan. So I downloaded it and gave it a whirl, not realizing that the default model was gpt-5.6-sol. Well after just an hour or two, I blew through my entire week's quota. Whoops! It would be cool if these harnesses could all graphically display your quota usage on the screen at all times.

Zak

The only time I've ever managed to burn through a quota that fast (on the cheap plan) was with an open-ended request to check a codebase for any defects or deficiencies. It dispatched five Fable subagents.

sva_

In 95% of cases it is because you had a large context for which the cache expired.

defied

I’ve been using headroom to save on token usage and it’s pretty effective.

jdthedisciple

this kind of stats feature should be shipped by default with every harness imvho

hungryhobbit

I just used Claude to write a plug-in which changed the bottom of the CLI to say: ( ) Usage: 34% (resets in 2h 47m) Context: 56% [Opus 4.6] auto mode on (shift+tab to cycle) That way if my usage starts shooting up, it's very easy to notice (and the color of "( )", which is a circle that I couldn't paste here, changes when it gets high, ensuring I don't miss it). I coupled that with a hook that watches for usage spiking (basically when I've been talking too long or did something to add a ton of context, so suddenly every turn sends a ton of context back, using up a ton of usage). Between the two I haven't hit usage caps in weeks.

skeledrew

I've been recording every statusline output for months now so I can easily get answers to questions like this whenever I wish.

LuD1161

I just checked the repo. Nice work A suggestion: 1. Adding which repo/project was where my most tokens were consumed. I checked the image in the repo README, didn't see that graph.

gverrilla

Having a good statusline is key! I use https://github.com/lpsgverrilla/lps-statusline

sachinneravath

Full story if anyone is interested - https://www.kelviq.com/blog/claude-code-usage-limits-where-t...

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